1st Nephi Chapter 1
1 Nephi 1:1 You have reached the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. Please leave a message. Hello Joseph. This is your editor. I'm looking at 1 Nephi 1:1 and I had a few concerns. One of the issues I noticed is that you start off the first verse with "I, Nephi" and throughout the books you continually identify the author. The four gospels in the new testament are 3rd person and the authors are anonymous. The book titles for the gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) were added about 150 years after Christs death and scholars are pretty confident some of them are incorrect. With that in mind some devout christian readers are going to have a hard time connecting with your first person narrative. Just something to keep in mind. Another issue is that you keep using unique phrases or unique phrases very similar to other books which is going to cause readers to think you plagiarized the book. Here are the examples in this verse. The phrase "Having been born of goodly parents" is pretty close to how Jonathan Swift starts out his book Gulliver's Travels which starts with the phrase "having been born of plain honest parents". You also use the phrase "having been highly favored of the lord" which is somewhat close to Luke 1:28 "that art highly favoured, the Lord is with thee". The phrase "mysteries of god" matches a phrase in 1 Corinthians 4:1 where it ends the verse with "the mysteries of God.". You also use the phrase "a record of my proceedings" which is really out of place since that phrase is primarily used for legal documents. Having an author describe their auto-biography as a legal document is going to rub some readers the wrong way. 1 Nephi 1:2 You have reached the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. Please leave a message. Hello Joseph. This is your editor. I'm looking at 1 Nephi 1:2 and I had a few concerns. At the start of this verse you use the word Yea. Yea means yes or aye. The only real exception is in the King James Bible where they use it to mean all sorts of different stuff.* * In 1 Samuel 21:5 it means "also" or "moreover". * In 2 Kings 2:3; 16:3, etc. it can mean also, likewise, or moreover. * In Psalms 102:13; 105:12, etc.it can mean inasmuch, certainly, or doubtless. * In Matthew 5:37; 9:28, etc it usually means "verily" * In Luke 2:35; Acts 20:34 it can mean "however" or "on the other hand" It looks like you are going to be using the "verily" or "truly" definition for the word. I really need to suggest that you don't use this word except with the current meaning as it is going to make it really hard to understand what you are saying. The only reason I can see you wanting to use this work is to make it sound more like the King James version of the bible and that isn't going to work to well in the long term since the King James version of the bible has so many flaws in its translation. Another issue you have in here is the word Jews*. That word didn't exist until 1000 AD. Since this verse occurred around 600 BC it would be impossible for that word to be in there. Instead of Jews you would use probably want to use the team people of Judeah. The last issue is with the language of the Egyptians. The language that was spoken and written at that time frame was Aramaic not Egyptian. * * Source: https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/yea/ * ** Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jew_(word) 1 Nephi 1:3 You have reached the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. Please leave a message. Hello Joseph. This is your editor. The text "I make it with mine own hand" sure looks like it has been copied from Philemon 1:9 where it says "I ... have written it with my own hand". 1 Nephi 1:4 You have reached the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith. Please leave a message. Hello Joseph. This is your editor. There are a lot of issues with this one. It looks like you use the phrase "For it came to pass" 4 times in this book. The bible uses that exact phrase 452 times. That is not a phrase you want to copy if you want to avoid plagiarism claims. I'll address the other phrase "And it came to pass" in a few verses. The phrase "of the first year" is used 53 times in the old testament of the king james bible and it is always used in relation to a goat or lamb sacrifice. It appears that the phrase "of the reign of Zedekiah, king of Judah" comes from Jeremiah 49:34 where it says "The word of the Lord that came to Jeremiah the prophet against Elam in the beginning of the reign of Zedekiah king of Judah, saying"